The day that marketing derailed

Published on April 16, 2019 and updated on November 15, 2021.

Updates November 15, 2021:

• By the time this post was published, Facebook was about to finish facing trial in front of the United States senate due to its role in what became known as the scandal of Cambridge Analytica. This episode, combined with the supposed Russian interference on the United States elections in 2016, made the European Union pass a group of laws to regulate the usage and protection of data that were collectively called GDPR, or General Data Protection and Regulation. GDRP, in turn, was used as a basis for many data protection laws around the world, including Brazil, which, on August 2018, sanctioned the General Law of Data Protection (LGPD). On August 2021, the Nacional Agency of Data Protection (ANPD), government branch created to ensure that the LGPD is being applied, was allowed to fine companies that aren’t operating on the law. Data protection laws brought significant impact for marketing departments, which saw behavioral data collection technologies lose their efficiency as privacy features got added to them;
• On April 2021, Apple launched Apple Tracking Transparency (ATT) for IOS 14.5 and upwards, a feature that ensures user privacy on Apple’s ecosystem by blocking many known trackers, which can only be loaded under user consent. Facebook was hit with this. Its paid advertising platform became less effective to target users of IOS devices and measure the return on investment of campaigns for this target audience.

I’m worried. The technology that is available for mass customization and tracking is incredible, something unthinkable until a generation ago. In a few years, we’ve went from not knowing which half of marketing budget was wasted and which one had returned to know how much should we spend to acquire a single customer across each channel. The possibilities of customizing and measuring the smallest of things brought the scientific approach to inside marketing structures from organization across all sizes and segments. If all this technological evolution brought more money for organizations, the same can be said for those that perceive value from what we create?

– If companies are increasing their profits it is because people are buying more, which indicates that they’re liking what we’re offering, right?

Maybe. And it is for not knowing that I’m worried.

What you’re about to read is an opinion. It is an opinion of someone which believes that the great powers that were given to marketing on digital times (which can also be the case for business intelligence, data science and any other areas that infer behaviors using data) aren’t accompanied with its great responsibilities in relation to the way these professionals work with people in the online world.

Intelligent systems: from absolute numbers to probabilities

Before anything else, I’m hired to make more and more people consume the products that are sold by companies. The way this is done is not really important, as long as it is inside the budget and the results are equal or greater than what was expected. If results are below expectations, I should justify and adjust the marketing strategy. If results are equal to the expectations or above, great (and slap on the back – good work). My critic is to this definition of what I do. Not that I don’t like what my profession is about: I got attracted by the many possibilities of the digital world still as a child, as I wrote once. It happens that as years passed I’ve been figuring out something somewhat dangerous on the way this work is done: reducing people.

This is not something new. Who have never called the help center of some company, navigate on a labyrinth of options when speaking to a virtual attendant, to end up with a human on the other side of the line, only for him / her to ask you for the same information you just gave when speaking to the virtual attendant? Upon finishing the call, your contact is resumed with a protocol number, which, theoretically, is used for something. Companies invest on virtual attendants to solve customer issues faster, giving to human attendants necessary information to provide support, although it not always look like this. Our toolbox for behavioral studies on digital systems is not that different from the way virtual attendants work: we use information that people are providing (and, unlike when talking with virtual assistants, they do not know they’re giving information) to design purchase systems compatible with their mental models (read it make the purchase process “easier”, ou equivalent to give faster support). Upon purchasing, a order number is created, representing a concluded transaction between two or more parties. Just like the attendant doesn’t know the person he / she just spoke to, we don’t know who bought after the order is generated (no, knowing your persona is not the same thing of knowing who actually made a purchase). Here is the part of the message that will be highlighted throughout this post: design purchase systems compatible with their mental models.

These purchase systems are created with many tools. The toolbox of digital marketing professionals have heat maps, web analytics, session recording, questionnaires, polls and product usage metrics, to cite some (and tomorrow something new will make its way into this list). The toolbox is incredible, but it is not enough to teach us how to create truly one to one experiences. What we can do with all that is learned from these tools is to classify people by its probability of belonging to certain groups, based on their digital behaviors, and use that to create some customization mechanism. As we collect data and learn, we create journeys that are more and more specific, each person having its own personalized experience. Sometimes this works.

If systems from old days coded us as numbers inside its vast databases, the ones from nowadays combine our numeric representations with behavioral data, always quantitative (since they also quantify qualities), and then spit probabilities. If you bought a pair of shoes and 70% of people like you that are visiting the store bought socks, you probably will buy socks, so look here at this nice pair that I’m recommending to you. If you didn’t bought the socks that were recommended by the system, then it is fine, since 7 out of 10 people like you would probably have bought. Without this predictive system I would show anything at the store to try to cross sell products with 50% success rate, assuming that I have no prior knowledge about my customers.

– I still don’t see any problem. We’re selling more, this has nothing to do with reducing people…

Only when the remaining 3 / 10 are neglected and when your behavioral study tools suggest us that we could transform win-win relationships with the remaining 7 / 10 on not so win-win relationships. Examples:

– Mac OS users are willing to pay more, as I saw on my Analytics tool. I’ll configure my website to show higher prices for those that use Apple devices.

– This same session ID visited my airline ticket website 4 times just today. I’ll increase the price to send the message: buy now or prices will go higher.

I don’t see we questioning very often if answers to the question “what can be done to make more and more people become customers?” can lead us to do questionable things, leaving aside the great responsibility that comes with great powers.

Let’s analyze a more tangible example. Amazon and its buy with one click feature. If you bought on Amazon and saved you payment, personal and address data, you can, literally, hit a single button to make the next purchase. You only need to be logged in to see the button. It is comfortable. Easy. Very easy. Way to easy…

It isn’t hard to understand that the goal of this button is to increase sales. And it work wonders, giving the fact that the company applied for this patent in 1999 and, for some years, had exclusivity doing business this way. What is there of terrible in this button? It is terribly seductive. Induce. It stimulates impulsive purchase behaviors and increase the possibility for errors (increasing the revenue if the owner of the money doesn’t try to have it back. I myself tried to have my money back after purchasing by accident, but the return process is not as wonderful as buying, I even had to ask for help on Google). This button does just as it was designed to do.

– People click on their own free will.

Is that so? People are buying out of their own will or because we’re using our super incredible knowledge on behavioral economy to anticipate the most the pleasure of having something, stimulating the emotional aspect of the purchase over the rational? When selling something to someone, we don’t pay attention to the fact that the customer may be getting a debt or someone could be purchasing on its behalf (like a child that use the phone of her parents to browse the internet, ends up on Amazon, search for a toy and hit the button to buy with one click). When making the purchase process easier, we increase the probability that something like this can happen, be it intentional or not.

– Why should I care with any of that? After all, no one is being forced to enter my website or app to shop. Also, the formula is very simple: + sales = + goals achieved = + profit to the company = + profit share and dividends for everyone that made more people buy. Yay!

#ButNot

“Carnivorous plant” marketing

There are many ways to trick people that access our websites and apps. If technology enable digital marketing departments to optimize costs and return on investment on an unprecedented scale, it also pave the way for creating questionable strategies to convert more people into customers. I call marketing strategies that make use of such resources, such as the aforementioned Mac OS users or visitors of airline ticket websites, carnivorous plants (they could have been called mousetraps, cobweb, fishing net or harpoon – by the way, the last two terms are actually used to name marketing strategies such as inbound marketing and account based marketing, respectively). These are strategies that attract interested consumers and, at any given moment… BAM! They are devoured, crushed or hooked by techniques that stimulate impulsive behavior, just like flies meet their end inside a carnivorous plant.

But it needn’t be like this

By the time this post is being written, Vivo released a campaign that is called “there is time for everything”. A series of short videos were released featuring young people on daily situations being confronted with a choice to live the current moment with those who are around or stay all the time connected on your smartphones. At the end of every video, actors choose to turn their phones off and live the moment. Why a company like Vivo would do something like this, encouraging people to stay away from the products that it sells (data plans and smartphones)?

Interestingly this is not an isolated case. Companies like Google and Apple also wants us less time online to live the moment, which implies in making less usage of the products that theses companies provide. For some time now, parents from this generation, including those from Silicon Valley that develop such technologies, already try to establish limits for using technology at home, but now there are companies taking the matter into their own hands.

My take on the matter: it doesn’t matter if we consume by impulse if that is making us slaves from products and services that don’t offer nothing besides a far away light at the end of a solitude and desperate tunnel created, in part, by these same technologies that we carry on our pockets. Companies that develop these campaigns are thinking both ways, I imagine: why we keep selling these products if they are creating unhealthy lifestyles? It is better to help people understand how to better use their products, which will allow for a healthier environment for business for both parties in the long run. The alternative is forcing the technology industry to advertise their products on cigarette like packages, with big letter messages on its back warning users of the prejudice when using them for long periods of time (or by just using them).

We’re seeing some initiatives from a movement which I believe will only increase, as we develop the debate on the role of technologies in our lives. Confronted with such initiatives I ask myself: could we create something similar inside the departments of the organizations we work for and at the professional communities we’re part of? Could we learn something from these campaigns to develop a new mindset on how to do marketing?

Enters the sunflower marketing

The common thread between each initiative that was presented is thinking both ways, looking to create a healthier environment to sustain long lasting relationships between both parties (companies and consumers) and not to benefit just one of them. And how does this apply to marketing? If the carnivorous plant marketing is the one that study the right moment to attack, what I’m calling sunflower marketing is the one in which relationships are built over trust between people, so that they feel free and safe inside our products, having room to ponder choices rationally and being the sole owners of their own browsing experiences, just like a bee freely navigates between sunflowers. Think about that: while carnivorous plants feed on insects that fly around them, bees that feed on the pollen produced by sunflowers take it to their hive and also spread it around other flowers in a process called pollination, which fertilizes the soil and produces new sunflowers. This is a legitimate win-win relationship.

No, this is not a new framework, method, methodology or process

From acronyms, process, methods and methodologies we are fed up. I believe we don’t need anything more than a new perspective on how we look at what we do and for who we do it. It is not necessary to change the toolbox or create new processes. It suffice that discussions on the impact that we do happen on every reunion table, as well as the commitment of giving to the people that are impacted, and only them, complete control over their experiences inside the products and services that we use.

Sunflower marketing is based on at least three premises: honesty, transparency and trust. Why these values are important for any organization? People are more and more suspicious of what we're doing. What is worse is that they’re right to be, since discussions like the one being provoked on this post aren’t relevant topics on speeches, universities and technology blogs. Discussions on ethics for products and services development and distribution are marginal, while it gets harder to offer something to our target audiences as people get more and more suspicious of what they can’t see, hear or feel. Trust is not something optional in an online environment surrounded by misinformation: it is the bare minimum required to establish any relationship with people whatsoever.

For the remaining topics. Honesty: fulfill what promised. If you committed to create a browsing and purchasing free from mental traps, create a browsing and purchasing experience free from mind traps. Commitment creates trust, even more if it is public and traceable, which takes us to the point of transparency. Transparency is establishing a relationship with visitors and customers looking them in the eye, when both parties are on a negotiation in which nothing is being hidden. Only with transparency we can approach potential customers with selling arguments.

The challenge of selling ideas

How does one present a way of doing business that avoid the carnivorous plant model to a company? If the company doesn’t approve the idea of weighing ethical discussions when producing what it sells, from top to bottom and from one side to the other, there are at least two ways to make such discussions make their way into meeting rooms: starting internal movements or by external forces. Starting internal movements means run pilot projects that incorporate honest and transparent practices when creating or improving products, and use what was learned to convince decision makers that it is possible to align good business practices with profit. External forces means that the need for transparency, honesty and trust is coming from the community to whom the company serve. We’re seeing this movie today with Facebook. Since the company was accused of being used as a medium to tamper with elections in the United States by Cambridge Analytica, it understood the importance of safely collecting, processing and transfer the data of its more than 2 billion active users. Zuckerberg himself publicized that Facebook is committed for the next years to fight against the bad side of its social network, even if this means losing revenue. At the beginning of 2019, Facebook announced several changes to make the social network not only fun, but that it doesn't hurt the well being of people. If it’s going to work? It is not possible to know yet, but this episode shows how honesty, transparency and trust are non negotiable values for consumers.

Generating revenue with blogs

Let’s analyze what is and what is not a sunflower marketing strategy. You have a blog that generates revenue and, for this specific business, engagement metrics are important to estimate the portion of your traffic that return to the website. You need people to spend more time interacting with your content to increase the amount of time they’re exposed to ads, which pays you and rent the infrastructure that hosts your blog. You have a financial incentive that could easily seduce you into setting up all sort of mechanisms that stimulate given behaviors, like making people click on certain areas of your page to increase ad revenue. On the other hand, you social incentive of promoting content gets weaker as bills keep stacking up one after the other. How bad are some popup windows, animated banners on the sidebar or messages on the corner of the screen, right? All the content is still there, it is just a matter of clicking or touching the screen two or three more times and people will still see the entire content.

Some extra clicks probably won’t make anyone’s fingers fall off, but it so happens that, little by little, people are getting vaccinated before entering the dangerous terrains of the internet (carnivorous plants are losing their charm) and search engines are better and better when it comes to give people the right information at the right time. More informed and in front of curated content, finding your blog in the first place becomes a challenge for those who’re searching for something that you have to offer. Problems aren’t done once users arrive on your website, though. Google says that 53% of mobile visits leave websites that take more than 3 seconds to load, and most searches done on Google are mobile. If your blog is still alive and a persisting visitor waited longer than 3 seconds for your page to load, he or she still have to decide, on the next few seconds, if your content is really what they’re looking for. Those are precious seconds and it is what you have to present yourself as a trustful source of information. A dozen of irrelevant ads popping up on the faces of your visitors could make them go back to Google, signaling to the search engine that your content is not relevant (a carnivorous plant that lost the fly before the fatal snap). Ads are boring 99.7% of time (source: voices on my head), but if they are so important to maintain your blog, you have at least three options to use them without scaring your visitors:

• Explain to your visitors that, although ads are inconvenient, they are necessary to maintain the blog and to keep offering quality content;
• Try to make the ad watching experience the less annoying as possible for users consuming your content (here you can find some good examples, by the way);
• Create business models that allow for your most loyal customers to financially support your work, by donating or subscribing.

I’m no blog specialist, but I would say that none of these options is very cheery. Who’s going to invest in an unknown blog that was only found by chance when searching on Google? On the contrary, it is possible that your visitors join the crescent masses of ad blocker users or retreat on the first sign of a paywall, making the case that they don’t want their browsing experiences bloated by irrelevant distractions.

There are those who know how to generate profit using blogs, and, if I’m to guess how do they do that, I would say that there is no magic: they created relevant content for specific topics that can be found on search engines, hosted their content on apps that load fast, and built their authorities together with other known names within the same topics. A long and hard work, as it should be if the goal is to be trusted by those who find these websites. Trust is established as visitors return to your website, refining the keywords as they search until finding you by name online or by receiving your newsletter. Those who get to this place have no doubts about the honesty of the work: it serves the purpose of giving relevant content for this loyal audience and from there transparency flourishes: a organic and voluntarily exposition to what you have to sell that could make the life of shoppers better (sounds like inbound? Because I think that’s what Hubspot was talking about when hey popularized this strategy. I didn’t even needed to have used carnivorous plants and sunflowers to explain the idea…).

Think that this blog example is not so different from other business models. As a consumer, I love Mercado Livre. It is, for me, a good example of a digital platform rich in content. I trust Mercado Livre due to its many trust indicators exposed all over (they make sure these are visible). Every time I buy something on the website it arrives just the way I saw in the ad (honesty), usually before the estimated time to arrive, and I never had to change anything. In the end, I feel fine receiving recommendations and offers that are announced on the marketplace (transparency). This content is not from a blog, but products from a network of merchants that, throughout the years, built their reputations inside the marketplace while were awarded with the badge “It is among the best merchants on Mercado Livre”. Mercado Livre’s role is to create this environment of honesty, transparency and trust that reassures shoppers and merchants that have never seen one another, but feel safe to buy and sell from one another.

Successful blogs, websites such as Mercado Livre and many other digital products that we love don’t usually do behavioral studies in order for maximize their chances of success? I’m sure that they do, just like I’m sure that they don’t trade their authority and trust among their target audience for anything that might shake this fruitful relationship, including the adoption of questionable tactics to maximize their profits. I believe that is the difference between companies like these ones and those that try to induce certain online behaviors. Access Smashing Magazine's website and click on any of their articles. Not only is the content of high quality, it have a pleasure reading experience and its maintainers make sure that their visitors know how hey use ads on their website. This is honesty. It is the sum of trust, honesty and transparency that allow for happy endings when a commercial relationship is celebrated between two or more parties. From inconveniences, ads become something truly relevant, eliminate the need of ad blockers and sponsor the project so it can stay alive, like a good sunflower that provide nutrients for entire hives of bees that, in turn, spread some of the pollen around the environment in which they live, enabling new sunflowers to be born.

The day marketing gets back to its rails

I’m worried, but also hopeful. Under the premise of optimizing conversions, we induce people to take actions they would possible avoid if they knew what was behind a form. As marketing professionals, we have our own share of guilt when creating online environments with no honesty, transparency and trust. Each day more and more customers are aware of their digital surroundings, vaccinated in order to navigate this toxic environment searching for people and brands to whom they can relate with no suspicion. Some companies take for themselves the responsibility of building this trust, and although are just a few, show their commitment in cleaning up the mine field that the internet has become, with their tentacles ready to enter inside one’s pocket and grab a few cents with accidental clicks, undesired views and purchase journeys full of mind traps.

It is completely possible to create business models that don’t rely solely on conversion optimization tactics to grow, but it is fundamental to build a healthy relationship between people and companies, which will only be possible the day in which we stop cultivating carnivorous plants and start cultivating sunflowers. It is from that day forward that the responsibility will follow up again the great powers that were given to us, digital marketing professionals (and data analysts, business intelligence, data science and all other areas that infer behaviors based on data). If we have our share of guilt on creating some of the many traps that surround the internet and its questionable business practices, we can redeem ourselves leading the process to give back trust for all the people that walk around this digital world every day. We can use the powers that were given to us to incite internal organizational changes on our workplaces, focusing on gaining the trust of people one day at a time. The alternative way is that the need for change comes from external forces and, in the worst of scenarios, we have to explain ourselves in front of the courts from our countries.

So, do you accept this challenge?

Let’s create responsible products!